What does Critical Literacy Mean to Me?

Before this course, I admit that as a first grade literacy teacher, my goal was for my students to be able to understand, verbalize and make connections to texts we read - to go beyond just learning to read, but also reading to learn from all types of books (fiction, non-fiction, informational, biography, etc.) However, I did not looking critically at the books I was choosing to educate my students.

Critical literacy means creating spaces in my classroom for books that force children to think not only about the story itself but also the internal structures that allow students understand and make connections to the text. Students need to be aware of the role of different characters, how an author's point of view influences the story, how different people of race and religion are represented in sets of text (either found in school, in the media, in movies, etc.)

At first, I was a bit disheartened in my own teaching because many of the books I had been choosing had not been especially good examples of diverse and unbiased literature. But critical literacy has helped me to understand that children need to be exposed to all forms of text - but what is important is how we guide them to interact with the text as readers and critical thinkers.